Monday, April 20, 2009

Dr. Sam, advice needed please?

How bad are wisdom teeth to remove?

do you have an email address I can contact you at? You can IM it to me if you like (eendje1990).

Dr. Sam, advice needed please?I was thirteen when i had all of mine removed at the same time. If you have a good dentist you will have no worries. Just make sure you don%26#039;t have any aspirin based pain killers. These will thin your blood and make you bleed more. Good luckReply:When people ask for encouragement about getting their wisdom teeth out, I like to share this story about my three children.

I removed two of my older daughter%26#039;s wisdom teeth at 2:00 in the afternoon and told her to go home and lie down until dinner time. Before I got home, she had already left for the mall! I was rather angry, because I figured that she%26#039;d be moaning all night long and asking me what to do for the pain. Much to my happy surprise, she seemed just fine. She said that she waited until the numbness started to go away and she felt pretty good, so she decided to get up and go.

Same thing with my son. We were actually headed home from a drum lesson and he asked if we could stop in the office to check out the sore place in his mouth. It turned out to be an erupting wisdom tooth. He asked if I felt like taking it out right then, so I did. (I was afraid he might change his mind if he thought about it overnight.) His mom didn%26#039;t even know he had a wisdom tooth taken out until he had to take the gauze out of his mouth to eat dinner. His uppers were both kind of difficult and he had trouble healing with one of them (sinus involvement), but that didn%26#039;t last for more than 3 or 4 days.

With my third child, I took her to the oral surgeon, because the roots were sort of close to the nerve and _I_ didn%26#039;t want to be the one to cause her any trouble if things got difficult. She had nitrous oxide and little bit of iv sedation and had all four removed at once. I wanted to get her right home, but she asked me to stop off at the mall before we went home. She insisted that she was okay. Instead of going home and lying down, she walked through the mall. Yes, she was biting on her gauze packs (in the mall!), but still she was a lot more active than I would recommend. She had no trouble at all healing. I think she went out that night, too. (It was 1999, so I don%26#039;t remember the details.)

I%26#039;m not saying that they are ALL like this, but there are wisdom teeth and then there are w*!`S^D@m TEETH!!! I always say that wisdom teeth (and root canals, by the way) are like teenagers. At least 90% are no trouble at all, but everybody talks about the bad ones.